Pär Lagerkvist

Lagerkvist grew up in a strict pietist household in Växjö whose faith he broke from early, though its questions (belief, guilt, the reality of evil) never left his work. As a young writer in Paris before the First World War he absorbed Cubism and other new movements, and his 1913 manifesto Verbal Art and Pictorial Art helped import literary modernism into Sweden; he spent the interwar decades writing poetry, plays, and increasingly parable-like fiction.

Barabbas, the criminal freed instead of Christ, distilled his lifelong theological unease into a short, austere novel that became his best-known work internationally. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, 1951, and continued writing spare philosophical fiction (including The Sibyl and The Dwarf) into his final decades.